Assignment 1 – Say Hello

The Brief –

For this assignment I wanted to introduce myself through Pink Angeleno as this is how I brand my work on social media and on this blog and I know that my tutor already knows who I am and what my work is like, but many people always ask me why Pink Angeleno is Pink Angeleno.

Pink Angeleno was born in 2019 when I first started my course, I needed a brand name that represented me and my work and I was really struggling because I had no idea if I was actually good at Design or whether it was just a pipe dream. I had no idea who I was at that point, where I was going, what I was doing or whether what I was producing was any good. I felt absolutely lost and just dreamed of running away to live a happy, sunshine-unicorn-rainbow life in LA! I do love LA and California and held on to the dream that I might make it back there one day.. I was like an Angeleno that was just lost and living elsewhere! I also loved the colour Pink and this is the colour that everyone associated me and my designs with. it only seemed appropriate that the original name I chose – “Graphically Pink” morphed into Pink Angeleno. I wanted the energy, the fast pace, the colours, the vibes, the excitement and adventure, the street art, the hidden places and the glamour of that lifestyle. I wanted Pink Angeleno to showcase my OCA work but I also wanted it to represent this “pipe dream”. As it turned out though, Pink Angeleno has served me well as I have returned to LA and I know where I am going as a Graphic Designer.

I wanted to come up with a design that would be suitable for this assignment but something that I could also use moving forwards to represent my brand.

I explored in my mind the boundaries of the brief… The brief stated “greetings card” but I wondered whether a post card could class as a greetings card. After doing some research and searching Google for some one sided “post card style” greetings cards, I realised that they are two very separate things and that I should stick to what the original brief wanted.

The brief allowed any type of media but I decided to do this assignment digitally using Illustrator.

I started off with brainstorming some ideas in my sketchbook about what I might want to include on my design:

*The photos of the Roses on the page are nothing to do with this assignment but I am trying to document as much as I can in my sketchbooks – I had a lovely evening of dog sitting my Dads dogs and he lives in a countryside 1600s house with a big garden full of amazing flowers and I sat down on this night with a glass of wine, cut a rose from the garden, lit the fire and sat down to sketch. It was bliss.. so I decided to document the moment!

I sometimes on my social media post a photo of my desk space with the caption “Greetings from Pink Angeleno HQ” SO I decided to move forwards with this idea. I had the idea to illustrate my working space on the front of the card. I then had the idea to make the card have a design on the front and the inside and allow the design from the front to flow on the inside of the card. How I imagined this was to have my Mac on my desk space have a wallpaper which would then continue onto the inside. The wallpaper I had in mind was the Hollywood sign and then on the inside of the card I would illustrate more of the Hollywood Hills from a photograph I actually took whilst I was hiking the Hollywood Hills and include some little illustrations around the outside of other things in LA that I liked which would sum up my interests and why I called Pink Angeleno “Pink Angeleno”.

I also explored the idea of pop up cards and more complex designs – I later decided to keep it simple though as this is an introductory, simple brief and I felt it didn’t require the complexity. It would also be easier for the print process being one sided and a simple A5 tent-fold card.

I took a photograph of my desk space:

From the photograph I then drew out the first initial drawing of my desk space in Illustrator. I missed out the non important “clutter” and kept the essential items from my desk space. Once I had the basic drawing I could then go about adding colour:

I added colour and I just didn’t think much of it. It had everything in the illustration from my desk space but it didn’t show Pink Angeleno… there was nothing pink truly about it and the only element that hinted on LA was the wallpaper on the Mac. I have my cuddly toy chameleon (George!) sitting on top of my Mac and thought it would be fun to make him interact with the screen in the illustration!

I then sat and thought more about Pink Angeleno and how to best illustrate this on my greetings card. My current Pink Angeleno brand was neither here nor there.. I had a drawing I drew for my first ever OCA assignment which was a similar one to this… Create a postcard sharing who you are and the illustration I created for this I have kept as part of pink Angelenos identity all the way through. it is significant as this is how people identify my design and work and it is how It all came about:

I knew that I cannot reuse old work, but I then wondered if I could update Pink Angeleno which would help with my assignment and also create more of a solid brand for my work moving forwards.

Pink Angeleno is very vector based, a lot of my work are illustrations that I have drawn and then created into Vector art using Illustrator so I knew that my work for this assignment would be the same.

Once again, I turned to my sketchbook and started to sketch out little ideas that I feel sum up what Pink Angeleno stands for.

“You can’t grow in a comfort zone” is pivotal to me – it is what made me jump out of my seat and go for it in the first place. in my first ever sketchbook I drew a random doodle of this so it was only relevant to use it as part of this. Free Falling, a song by Tom Petty describes the emotion of wanting to fall off the top of the Hollywood Hills – it is I believe a song about getting out of a relationship but I associate it more with a feeling of escaping reality – that is very much the basis of the origins of Pink Angeleno. Melrose Avenue is just a cool place – shady in some areas I guess- but just a cool place! It is full of street art, graffiti, bright colours, thrift shops, unique bars and everything quintessentially LA!

Here are a few snaps I took of Melrose:

Cool right?… oh… also, here is my husband enjoying it too! – (with my Barbie bag!) 😛

“What’s your dream?” is an iconic line from Pretty Woman the film that I just had to include.

From drawing all of these I then had the idea to scrap the original idea and use the photograph of me in front of the Paul Smith Pink wall as a basis for a completely new idea..

I thought about using the photograph to create something like this:

I put both ideas on the back burner until I had drawn out my illustrations:

I then figured I needed to rebrand my Pink Angeleno logo ever so slightly.. the first ever original drawing I did for it was back in 2019 and I didn’t know or take into consideration then the readability and size of it when making it as part of a logo..

After a lot of thought though I didn’t want to lose the original identity of it as it means a lot to me so I went to work adapting it and making it as part of a basic logo.

I sketched up some more ideas for a logo – these manifested as a simple letter P with angel (or Angeleno) wings:

This was the final logo that I settled on and I quickly made it as part of my social media!

I also gave my original drawings a “glow up” and adapted them with my illustrations from my sketch book.

I then went back to both of my ideas for my greetings card and decided to go back to the first original drawing and idea but just to include the recent illustrations I had drawn. I used the colour combo of Pink and Green just because I love the colour pop and the colours remind me of a Watermelon, summer splash combo!

The colours of it here are extremely bright and vivd because I have saved it as a RGB PNG suitable for screens; however the file format I saved for print was a PDF format:

I also added a QR code onto it.. What better way to show who I am than a card with a direct link to my website? Instant promo and info on who I am.

My document was set up in Illustrator to an A5 size with a 3mm bleed.

I have never sent anything off for professional print before, but as I now work as a Graphic Designer in my new job, I have experience of sending artwork off to print with various print companies. One of the companies we use is printed.com. I only wanted 1 printed card which not many companies can do without a minimum of 10 prints but printed.com were able to print just 1 of my cards which was ideal and saved me unnecessary, added expense.

http://www.printed.com

I set my card up for print in PDF format following these steps: